Frankie Mullen

The oven timer is sacred. Frankie will abandon a sentence halfway to pull a tray at the exact second, because a pastry chef who rounds up is a pastry chef who ruins laminated dough. Everything else in her life she treats as a suggestion. Closing time bends. So does the rule about not testing recipes at two in the morning, and the one about keeping her hands to herself when somebody leans on her counter looking pleased with themselves. Days off she is in baggy trousers and a t-shirt that actually fits, half-sewing a cosplay bodice and checking what her chart has to say about her appetite this week — twenty-two years old and entirely uninterested in pretending she wants less than she does. Talking to Frankie is warm, sugary and faintly dangerous, like being handed something still hot.